Category Archives: Film

“Game of Thrones” Stars tossed in the “Storm”

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Elle Fanning and Douglas Booth as Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley

More casting has been announced in the now filming Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley story “A Storm in The Stars” added to the principal lead characters of Elle Fanning as Mary, Douglas Booth as Shelley and Bel Powley as Claire. Some time ago a Game of Thrones cast member, Sophie Turner, had been announced to play Mary Shelley in an alternative project “Mary Shelley’s Monster”, which hasn’t taken off, but more alumni from the HBO medieval hit have now found their way into the Haifaa Al-Mansour directed version of the stormy relationship of the 19th Century poetic personalities from a screenplay by Emma Jensen and Conor McPherson.

 

Maisie Williams (Arya Stark on Thrones) has been tapped to play Mary’s childhood friend Isabel Baxter, who Mary knew from her stay with the Baxter family in Dundee Scotland, and Stephen Dillane (Stannis Baratheon on Thrones) will play Mary’s father, publisher William Godwin, alongside Joanne Froggatt from Downton Abbey who plays Mary’s step-mother and Claire’s mother, Mary Jane Clairemont. The actor chosen to play the mad and bad Lord Byron with whom Claire has an illegitimate child, Allegra, has been revealed as Tom Sturridge (Henry IV in “The Hollow Crown” and the romantic soldier from the recent remake of “Far From The Madding Crowd”). Ben Hardy is also in the cast and Ciara Charteris is playing Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.

Some newcomers are also in the film, Ingridi Verardo De Moraes, Michael Cloke, and Donna Marie Sludds. The picture has been shooting in Dublin for the London scenes and production is scheduled to move to Luxembourg sound stages.

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A Storm in the Stars Film Shoots

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Douglas Booth as Shelley

The Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley biopic “A Storm in the Stars” has begun production in Ireland, with Elle Fanning as Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley, Douglas Booth as Percy Byssche Shelley and Bel Powley as Claire Clairmont. The cast has been spotted about Dublin in costume, rather shivering in the cold weather, despite woolen coats and cravats, while the recent casting of Ben Hardy has been announced (it’s unclear whether he is playing Byron, Polidori or Hogg), and Ciara Charteris is playing Shelley’s first wife Harriet, who committed suicide before Percy and Mary could be married.

 

The film is being directed by Saudi-Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour following her acclaimed debut film “Wadjda”. The film’s story from a screenplay by Romance novelist Emma Jensen with co-writing credit by Irish writer Conor McPherson, follows the period in the saga when Claire moves in with the Shelleys for the writing of the novel of “Frankenstein”, and the young author’s tempestuous love affair with Percy Shelley, the infamous and familiar trip to Lake Geneva with Lord Byron, Claire’s illegitimate child with Bryon and all the drama surrounding the rocky road that turned Mary into a legend. Filming has been spotted around the Collins Barracks in Dublin. The film should be released late in 2016, at least to the festival circuit. No US theatrical distributor has been announced, while international sales are being handled by the UK’s HanWay

The period of this film takes place after the journey of Mary, Percy and Clairmont to France and their early relationship explored in The Frankenstein Diaries, The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley. Douglas Booth is currently appearing in another Regency era literary mashup “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. Elle Fanning most recently appeared in “Trumbo”.

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200th Shelley Anniversary Film Fest at Wellesley College

In the past few years, mashups—like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, currently gobbling theaters—have meant classic works have undergone radical pop transformations at the hands of Hollywood. Wellesley College in Massachusetts is taking a decidedly more unique approach in its celluloid celebration of the 200th anniversary of one classic text, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For the prestigious all-women’s college, Shelley embodies an artist who, despite a literary world hostile to women writers, produced one of our most enduring stories, one that continues to be re-interpreted by every generation.

The College’s popular movie series, Cinephile Sundays, is honoring Shelley herself, and by extension the iconic horror story of science gone awry, by screening several films on campus. Some films allude to Shelley’s life; others reflect on, in often invitingly oblique ways, her famous monster and the issues brought up by her novel. The films being screened are stitched together under a theme of “Exquisite Combinations,” bringing to life the ways Shelley and her work have gone on to inspire filmmakers. In this series of five very different films, Shelley’s Gothic 19th-century literary vision plays out in a 20th-century artform, creating new conversations and foregrounding the long shadow of her influence and life.

One of the most iconic offerings is a screening of the silent film Metropolis, on Sunday, Feb. 28th, accompanied by a rare live musical soundtrack. Not specifically taken from Frankenstein, but clearly inspired by it. This triumph of Weimar Germany filmmaking is about Maria, an artificial woman created in the lab in Metropolis, with music for the silent film performed by Alloy Orchestra.

The first film in the series is perhaps the most explicit in its connection to Shelley’s story. The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) screens Sunday, Feb. 14. It is the sequel to the 1931 hit Frankenstein. It is widely seen as director James Whale’s masterpiece and is viewed as an icon in the genre of classic horror, delving closer to the themes of the actually novel than the original, with a cinematic appearance by Shelley herself, with Elsa Lancaster in dual roles.

The remaining films reflect widely different styles, take place around the globe, and have very different connections to Shelley and her work. The films include one on the persistent theme of man and machine (Paprika), another about the haunting effect the film Frankenstein has a little girl (El espiratu de la colmena), and lastly a film featuring another woman pioneer, Ada Lovelace, who calculated the first computer algorithm (Conceiving Ada). All films are screened in Wellesley’s Collins Cinema. Times and Dates.

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Victor Frankenstein Movie – Sewn of Borrowed Parts

It’s Alive – The Monster Arrives and Quickly Dies

victor_frankenstein_mcavoy_radcliffeReview – Warning, spoilers abound. Okay, I looked forward to the new revisiting of the Frankenstein story with some anticipation, but rather like the creature itself, the movie of “Victor Frankenstein” seems a construction of parts from other movies brought to life by a spark of imagination before being destroyed by its creators, a giant creature with two hearts instead of one, intended to power it for a modern audience, but ultimately ending in an epic failure of hubris. (Currently about 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, fairing a little better with viewers than reviewers). It’s not a bad movie, offering enough entertainment value to fill the time, but rather less than fulfilling the promise of new generational watermark.

There’s something about the opening with its rip off of the “movie” Sherlock Holmes style of stopping the action for a graphic representation of what the characters are sensing, with the music and graphic tone that almost immediate says “hey, I’ve seen this before”, from which it never quite recovers, like a patient with a fatal flaw that will ultimately kill it. The effect is abandoned for most of the movie until the end, when it reappears and you’re head is saying, “oh that’s what that was for”. The film story certainly has some inventive turns and tricks, but staggers unevenly between clever solemnity and buddy comedy. For purists, it has as much in common with the literary “Frankenstein” of Mary Shelley as did “Frankenstein’s Army” but the director, Paul McGuigan, stated on the publicity trail that the book of Frankenstein was boring, so might as well have at it. Victor Frankenstein offers at least one reference to his sewn together creature as “The Modern Prometheus”, so there, but all the rest is pretty much movie iconography references including one lame mispronunciation of the name as Fronkensteen, so you presumably get the Mel Brooks crowd. In fact, the whole Igor as hunchback assistant, mostly comes from the “Young Frankenstein” take. The club scene could have added a tap dance of “Puttin’ On The Ritz”, but that was an opportunity missed.

Victor Frankenstein, neither a doctor, nor a baron, but a bright medical student gathering animal parts from zoos and in this case the circus, where he has cut of a lion’s paw, from some lion we have not seen, witness the circus hunchback perform a medical miracle to save the beautiful trapeze artist performing (without a net), who falls, breaking a collar bone. Frankenstein rescues the hunchback from a cage and in the escape through a clever bit with a mirror, a pursuer is killed. The two are sought for murder by an oh too clever police detective on his own crusade of God verses science.

Victor Frankenstein transforms the hunchback into a fine upstanding young man by draining the puss from a cyst on his back that has somehow also bent his body, straightening his posture with the brace, that also manages to transform a young man who has never left the circus since he was a small child him into an erudite charmer, given the name of Igor, who can now enter London society with the slightest notice, whose medical genius has come from some medical anatomy books, while a London hospital can’t seem to manage to properly medicate a patient with a broken bone.

Victor Frankenstein, who seems to have the skills of the most masterful surgeon of his age while still a student ignoring his studies, and a chiropractor to boot, claims his purpose is to improve mankind but has built a horrid animal monster from decaying flesh in the form of a sort of monstrous monkey that attacks the college theater when shocked into life with his special “Lazarus Fork”, which presumably a wealthy young toff is impressed enough by to be willing to murder to corner the technology market of bringing dead flesh to life.

The God thumping cop closes in on Victor Frankenstein’s London mansion laboratory, without a warrant, mind you, and the whole operation moves, rather like the second super expensive device from Contact, to another location, a remote castle in Scotland belonging to the rich kid, where the creation of a giant man with a heart to spare and extra lungs, turns into an epic failure, when Frankenstein finally realizes he can’t bring back his brother, whose death he feels responsible for in a childhood accident, to the living.

Frankenstein says he wants to create a sentient, intelligent being, but doesn’t seem to take the least precaution, when his animal experiment goes viciously wrong, but decides to proceed on Igor’s suggestion to build a powerful giant, without any thought at all to its mind and that it might have a bad temper being shocked to sudden life by a lightning bolt. The brain consideration only seems to come with some thought of a sequel (I doubt we will ever see). The creature when it comes to life, however briefly, seems to have an uncanny similarity to the monster as drawn for the Mr. Magoo cartoon version of the Frankenstein story, but where in the cartoon, the horrible creature spoke with the intelligence Frankenstein intended, here the monster just pretty muck breaks things before its two hearts become a pin cushion with anatomical directions. And the last line, “this is not life”, a slant riff on the old Colin Clive line “it’s alive” from the 1931 version, as Victor Frankenstein looks in the dead eyes of the botched monster he’s created, discovering that he has not made what he intended,  seems oddly apt for the effort as a whole.

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Frankenstein 1970 – Karloff Returns as Victor Frankenstein

Boris Karloff Returns to His Monster in Frankenstein 1970

frankenstein1970_color_fdThe Frankenstein legend has made another movie screen appearance, and of the latest incarnation of Frankenstein adaptation, Victor Frankenstein, reviews have been mixed to say the least, and the box office, rather a disappointment, though perhaps one might agree that it is if not the best, at least the most imaginative reimagining of the Frankenstein story since Frankenstein 1970.

Despite the date in the title, the film was shot in 1958 in Cinemascope Black and White. The 1970 was intended to give the low budget film a futuristic sense, though the only futuristic science fiction was its place in the 1950’s atomic bomb energy craze in horror films. The most stand-out feature was that it starred Boris Karloff (again as the monster, sort of, and that’s the final twist.

frankenstein-1970_alternate_fdThe storyline has a modern day Baron von Frankenstein who was tortured and physically mangled at the hands of the Nazis in post WWII Germany, because he refused to use his science skills for the Nazi war effort. The Baron is continuing his work as a scientist, but needing money to continue his experiments, he agrees to rent out his castle as a film location to a movie crew to film a television movie about his famous family, and his grandfather, the old Baron von Frankenstein of monster reputation. Little do they know the current Baron is following in his ancestor’s footsteps. The money allows Frankenstein to obtain a nuclear reactor to power his creation, rather than the old standby lightning bolts. But when he runs out of body parts he starts killing off the members of the film crew. This is done through his partially completed monster, a lumbering figure with his head completely bandaged, serving both a story function in the later reveal, and a budget saving device of not having to create a monster make-up. His creature has no eyes at first and kills the wrong girl, until he can get the right ones. When the end finally comes in a climactic burst of atomic reactor steam, and the bandages are removed, inside them is revealed the face of Karloff/Victor Frankenstein as he was before he was tortured, with a recoding played explaining that the Baron was trying to create a lasting version of himself for perpetuation of the family name.

frankenstein_1970_monster_fdOn an entertainment level it was very low budget and a bit of a cheat, with the monster. a mummy-like creature, a guy stumbling around in a bandage helmet ranking somewhere between Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster (a gorilla suit with a space helmet) and Project Metalbeast (with Kane Hodder – Friday 13th’s Jason, in a rented werewolf suit) but certainly an imaginative take on the legend and the lore of extending the Frankenstein world. I don’t know what poor Boris Karloff felt about it, but I can imagine. His career had reached a nadir in the late fifties. Abbot and Costello had come and gone, and Hammer horror was taking over the classic stories with new stars like Christopher Lee. The aging great horror star would see a bit of a resurgence in the early 1960’s, with some modestly decent horror projects, but perhaps a more reverent casting in television, where he would appear in episodes of shows like I Spy as a kindly but eccentric old gentleman in a Don Quixote quest, and even lend his name to a series of spooky comic books from Gold Key.

Frankenstein 1970 was shot on a left over set from an Errol Flynn film at Warner Brothers and directed by Howard W. Koch, who would go on to a rather illustrious career, ultimately as President of Production at Paramount Studios and producer of the Academy Awards shows. The film also starred Don “Red” Barry, who for actors like Karloff, who felt they were type cast, carried the actual name of his most famous character (Red Ryder)  in his professional name – imagine Sean “Bond” Connery or George “Spanky” McFarland. After Victor Frankenstein, maybe it’ll have to stay Daniel “Potter” Radcliff, because I doubt “Igor” is how he’ll be fondly remembered.

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FRANKENSTEIN – FACES OF THE MONSTER

The 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s creation and publishing of her novel “Frankenstein, or, The New Prometheus” is soon upon us, both the origination in that summer of 1816 on Lake Geneva and the first publishing of the novel in 1818. In the book, the creation of a living being from the parts of the dead, brought back to life had a description of a gangly oversized being of horrid visage, which Victor Frankenstein said he intended to be beautiful, but somehow, didn’t come out right.

“How can I describe … the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! … His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips …” From this brief outline of horror has come a stream of imaginings in film and art to represent the horror of Mary Shelley’s idea.

Today, the image of the Frankenstein Monster is indelibly etched in our consciousness, but that image of a square, flat-topped head with scars and bolts in the neck have mostly come to us from the 1931 movie version make-up of Boris Karloff, created by Hollywood make-up artist, Jack Pierce. But there have been many iterations of what the creature of Victor Frankenstein’s experiments with life and death would look like. Here are a collection of some of the many faces of the monster…

Boris Karloff Frankenstein 1931

Frankenstein Charles Ogle 1910 Edison Silent Film

Robert DeNiro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1994

The Famous Adventures of Mr Magoo 1965

Christopher Lee  Hammer Films 1957

The Munsters Fred Gwynne 1965

Young Frankenstein Peter Boyle 1974

1831 Book Edition Illustration

I Frankenstein Aaron Eckhart 2014

Benedict Cumberbatch Filmed Stage Production 2011

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A STORM IN THE STARS – A TEMPEST BY THE LAKE

Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley Film with Elle Fanning

“A Storm in the Stars” is an independent film in development for 2016.  Elle Fanning has been long announced to play Mary Shelley in the project, with Bel Powley to play step-sister Claire Clairmont. The project has been on development boards for about a year and gained traction with director Haifaa Al-Mansour signing on to direct the period re-telling of the love affair between poet Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, (then still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) which resulted in the writing of Frankenstein. The script is by Regency Romance novelist Emma Jensen scripting her first full-length film, depicting the relationship between Mary and Percy when Claire moves in with them, and the drama surrounding the writing of the novel, said to be “a fresh take on the unconventional life of 18 year-old Mary Shelley and her tempestuous love affair with charismatic poet Percy Shelley, the notorious trip to Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and the rocky road that made her into an icon”. No casting of Byron or others has yet been mentioned.

See A Storm In The Stars Film Shoots in Ireland Update

Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female director, who came on the scene with her critically acclaimed debut film about a girl trying to win a bicycle “Wadjda”, outed the project when she announced her attachment on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. The film seems now firmly underway after getting a boost at the 2015 Cannes Film Market with England’s HanWay Films handling foreign sales and the addition of Douglas Booth to play Percy Bysshe Shelley. Booth played the son in the Paramount version of “Noah”. Production is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2015. There is no US distributor announced yet. UTA Independent Film Group put the project together for Gidden Media and Parallel Film, and will be representing North American rights to the film. Joanne Burstein and Rebecca Miller serve as Executive Producers. Douglas Booth, Al-Mansour, and Bel Powley are all represented by UTA, while Elle Fanning is repped by WME. UK Distributor Artificial Eye picked up the as yet to be made film at Cannes. In a competition between versions of monstrous inspiration, this project seems to be gaining traction over a competing film project “Mary Shelley’s Monster” with “Game of Thrones’ ” Sophie Turner announced .

Reports suggest this film story takes place in the period starting a year before the summer of 1816 until the publishing of the novel two years later in 1818, with the events surrounding the “Gothic” summer at Villa Diodati in Geneva, the well-known scary story competition, and the relationships before and following, when the Shelleys (they weren’t yet married until the end of 1816), were hounded by scandal and Claire joined them as a near permanent third-wheel. This is the period following the elopement of 1814 and some of the same relationships related in “Frankenstein Diaries: The Romantics – The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelly” which depicts these characters as this extraordinary relationship was in its formation, and would appear in later volumes.

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VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN – THE MOVIE

Igor Finally Gets his Story Told!

Daniel Radcliffe James McAvoy Victor Frankenstein Movie

Daniel Radcliffe as Igor and James McAvoy as Victor Frankenstein on set

A big budget retelling of the Frankenstein story has finished shooting and will be showing in theaters  November 25th (in the US) from 20th Century Fox. The release date was recently pushed back from Halloween to Thanksgiving, switched with a Ridley Scott film, “Martian”. The project originated in 2011 and began filming at the end of 2013. The film stars James McAvoy as the titular Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Daniel Radcliffe as his assistant Igor, with Jessica Browne Findley from Downton Abbey as Lorelei. This version of the story from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus” takes a revisionist twist, telling the tale of obsession and hubris from the point of view of Dr. Frankenstein’s friend and assistant, there to observe his downfall. The movie was originally titled just “Frankenstein”, but in a crowded field of like projects in advance of the 200th Anniversary of the publishing in the novel in 1818, they went with a more specific Victor Frankenstein.

The story, (20th Century-Fox official synopsis) tells “when Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his trusted assistant Igor go too far in their noble attempts to aid humanity, Victor’s obsession turns to madness. He then unleashes his final creation — a monstrous figure that holds unimaginable terror for anyone its path”. Some photo images from the production have been released of the actors on the set, but the monster creation has yet to make an appearance. See Trailer

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel did not have an assistant character named Igor, and Victor Frankenstein was not really a doctor, but a student at Ingolstadt University. The idea of an Igor assistant first appeared in Universal’s “Son of Frankenstein” movie, with Bela Lugosi playing a character name Ygor, with a hunched back. Universal needed something for their other horror star to do in the Frankenstein series, and Bela went on to play the monster as well, later. Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” riffed off the assistant, now named “Igor” as a hunchback with a shifting hump, played hilariously by Marty Feldman, with his shifting eye to go with it.

I doubt there was any idea to give Daniel Radcliffe a humped back, and all images suggest a more urbane young gentleman, rather than an accented flunky, with the intent to give the age old, oft-told horror story the more recent “Sherlock Holmes” treatment, as a buddy movie of young idealistic scientist gone mad. Filming locations were all in the UK, and the characters suggest the heroes spend a good deal of time in the social club and theatrical world, between carousing and body parts hunting, so the German and Swiss settings of the novel appear changed to early 19th Century England. The filming locations included the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Manchester Town Hall and Albert Square in Manchester, Dunnottar Castle in Aberdeen and Hatfield House in Hertfordshire

The script for Victor Frankenstein was written by Max Landis who came to the fore with the high budget “found footage” effect film “Chronicle” and is directed by Scottish director Paul McGuigan, known for “Lucky Number Sleven” and “Wicker Park” but has mostly been directing television, notably the “Sherlock” series and “Devious Maids”. The Victor Frankenstein film also features actors Andrew Scott and Mark Gatiss from the “Sherlock” tv series, with Callum Turner, Freddie Fox and Louise Brealey in a large cast.

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